AI further reading suggestions.

This page contains some suggestions for further reading on specific
aspects of the course. It is obviously not intended that you read all these
books! If you wish or need to follow up an aspect of the course, these
may help.

Note: I quote some prices below, but these may not have been checked
recently! Prices are all in pounds and are given for the paperback
edition if available both paper- and hardbound.
All of these prices were checked on
John Smith's search engine
on 26th January 1998.
Most of the books on this page were in stock and all were orderable.

Philosophy of AI

When was the last time you were recommended a book costing 2 pounds?
An introduction to Turing's work is contained in
Andrew Hodges''Turing' (Orion, 2.00) in the Great Philosophers series.
Hodges also wrote the definitive biography
`Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence' (8.99) and
hosts a set of
web pages devoted to Turing.

There are many books covering background and source material on the
philosophy of AI and whether machines can think. An example is
`The Mind's I' edited by D.R. Hofstadter and D. Dennett
(Penguin, 15.00)
which contains
reprints of the paper by Turing on the Turing test and the paper by Searle
on the Chinese Room thought experiment and much else.

A number of books have been written on the whole
AI enterprise, ranging from very positive to very negative viewpoints.
Daniel Dennett has written `Consciousness Explained' (Penguin, 9.99).
Searle gave a series of Reith Lectures in 1984 on
his thought experiment and published these as
`Minds, Brains and Science' (Penguin 6.99). Other examples
worth looking at are `Computer Power and Human Reason'
by Joseph Weizenbaum,
(Penguin, 8.99),
`What Computers Still Can't Do' by Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press, 14.95),
`Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea' by
John Haugeland (MIT Press, 14.95),
and not one but two books by the physicist Roger Penrose:
`The Emperor's New Mind' (9.99) and
`Shadows of the Mind' (7.99).
Roughly speaking, Dennett is the most positive towards AI,
then we get gradually
more negative as we go through Haugeland, Weizenbaum, Dreyfus, Searle
and Penrose, although this only means positive or negative to the prospect
of creating thought and consciousness through AI, rather than positive or
negative towards achievements such as game-playing or speech recognition.

An all time classic in AI is the 1963 collection of essays
`Computers and Thought'
edited by Feigenbaum and Feldman. This has recently
been republished (MIT Press, 15.50).

No AI reading list is complete without a pointer to
Douglas Hofstadter's`Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'
(Penguin, 17.99 paperback)
although the book ranges much further afield than just AI.
Much less satisfying is Hofstadter's later collection of Scientific American
Essays `Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of
Mind and Pattern' (Penguin, 17.00 paperback), but it does contain
Hofstadter's dialogue with the Nicolai system and the circumstances in
which it took place. (Not on AI at all but very stimulating is the
`Person Paper on Purity in Language' in the same volume.)

Games Playing

Jonathan Schaeffer
has written a fascinating account of the development of the
Chinook world champion checkers program, in his book
`One Jump Ahead' (Springer Verlag, 25.50 hardback).
This is a warts-and-all account by the main author of the program and
probably the only book ever written for the lay reader about the development
of a single computer program. Because it is for the lay reader, the
AI techiques used are only sketched.